In July this year, the newly elected federal parliament will sit for the first time and while most pundits had expected a narrow majority or hung parliament, voters returned the Labor Party with a much increased number of seats. Earlier, on election day, I had volunteered for The Greens, handing out How-to-Vote cards at a small booth in the predominantly working class suburb of Pascoe Vale in Melbourne. What struck both myself and my fellow volunteers from the Labor Party, was the noticeable number of mostly middle-aged voters grimly marching past us, refusing to take any pamphlets and declaring that they were just here to get it over and done with. Voting, it seemed, was a chore, an inconvenience spoiling an otherwise fine Saturday, and something to get out of the way as soon as possible. It was a far cry from the official version of election day as a celebration of democracy with good cheer and burnt sausages on white bread. The level of discontent with the established parties was palpable and confirmed by a result awarding only two thirds of first preferences to Labor and the Coalition combined – the parties that have traditionally dominated the Australian democratic system.
At around the same time, my 20-year old daughter received an infringement notice for not voting in the local council elections six months earlier when she on a gap year travelling through Asia and Europe. The penalty: $99. While she had recorded absence on the relevant portal from the electoral commission, unbeknownst to her, the reason of ‘traveling outside Australia’ had been rejected. For the penalty to be rescinded, a form had to be submitted together with the plane tickets and itinerary issued by the travel agent as proof. Not too hard a task for her, but as a process probably more difficult to negotiate by people with fewer digital literacy skills or limited computer access.
My daughter’s infringement notice was one of about 450,000 issued for the 2024 local council elections in Victoria, more than double than were sent out for the 2022 State election. For the 2022 federal election in excess of 1.2 million administrative penalty fees at the rate of $20 each were issued, although the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) cautions that this high figure might have been influenced by the timing of this particular election at the tail end of the Covid pandemic. Data for the 2025 federal election will become available later in the year.
Australia prides itself on its compulsory voting system which has been around at a federal level since 1918. Together with preferential voting, it has become a mainstay of what we think makes Australian democracy special, particularly in times of political uncertainty. Compulsory voting has been widely credited for the stability and centrism of our politics.
Yet, it is debatable whether this stability really is due to compulsory voting or rather our system of preferential voting. The latter does not necessarily reward the most popular candidate in an electorate but the one who, after preference flow, the majority is prepared to tolerate. It is often assumed that the combination of preferential voting working hand-in-glove with compulsory voting is keeping right-wing populism – which has undermined many liberal democracies in the past decade – away from the levers of power. The first preference votes by political party, though, do not necessarily bear out this assumption: the far right, represented mainly by Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, followed by the newly formed Trumpet of Patriots and a range of splinter groups barely made it to 10% on first preferences, with One Nation being the strongest party with 6.4% nation-wide. This compared to about 12.2% for The Greens and 7.2% for assorted Independents. The size of the election loss for the Liberal Party has been in parts attributed the hard-man, Trumpian persona of Peter Dutton.
Proponents of compulsory voting must fear that if voting was voluntary, the turnout for the far right would at least hold, while voters for centrist and left candidates would stay home in large numbers. There is, as Julianne Schultz in a recent edition of The Monthly reminded us, an historical irony to this concern, given compulsory voting originated as a gambit to prop up the conservatives in Queensland in 1915 where the union movement was much superior in mobilising voters. This specific historical context has largely been forgotten in favour of the myth of it being an indispensable cornerstone of our democracy that is beyond questioning. John Howard was the last PM who spearheaded an attempt to abolish it but quickly realised that this was electoral poison and abandoned his foray into electoral reform.
But, could a case be made by the progressive left for voluntary voting given that on a philosophical level, the compulsory nature of our democracy cheapens basic emancipatory principles such as self-determination and personal autonomy. The most immediate problem here, of course, is that the progressive left in Australia is a much diminished force. It has largely fallen victim to the vagaries of our voting system that rewards the political centre and entrenches the kind of over-cautious, bland political managerialism which seems to be ill-equipped to deal with impending global crises of environmental collapse and structural economic inequality.
The influential Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) – probably best-known for its widely reported ranking of the world’s most liveable cities – also publishes an annual Democracy Index. It scores the political health of 165 countries across a number of categories including political pluralism and participation, political culture and civil liberties. The index ranks countries within four categories: fully-fledged and flawed democracies, followed by hybrid and authoritarian systems. While this annual research report is meant to assist global investors, and the data therefore has an inherent economic bias, the results overall resonate.
The 2024 report confirms the obvious, namely that liberal democracy is under siege. Only 25 countries qualified as fully fledged democracies, Australia among them. There were some changes to previous surveys. Greece, for example, which successfully stared down the challenge of the fascist “Golden Dawn” movement, has moved up from flawed to fully fledged democracy. Others, like the United States, still listed as a flawed democracy, have further embraced its anti-democratic forces and is sliding towards oligarchical authoritarianism.
Within the EIU grouping of 25 fully fledged democracies, three other countries have compulsory voting: Luxemburg, Greece, and Costa Rica. Only Australia enforces the law, collecting more than five million dollars for the Victorian State Government alone in the last financial year (fines at the federal level end up in consolidated revenue and the Australian Electoral Commission was not able to provide a figure).
The EIU list of fully-fledged democracies confirms that the link between compulsory voting and democratic health is at best tenuous. The Australian Electoral Commission itself concedes that it ‘could be argued that Australia is out of step with the world, or at least the industrialised world.’ Australia’s punitive approach has contributed to a system which is functional at a basic level. It keeps the disillusionment with the political process in check, but in the process reveals a fundamental distrust in the electorate by the political class. The law surmises a flaw in the Australian political psyche, an inherent tendency towards political apathy, stronger than in other democratic countries. A flaw that apparently can only be combatted through coercion.
Will the threat of hefty fines inspire, if not love, then at least a deeper loyalty towards representative democracy from young voters like my daughter, or the grumpy voters I met on election day? I doubt it. One could of course conceive an alternative: strengthening our democracy by levelling the playing field for participation, and creating a system in which everyone has the same opportunities to mobilise support among electors. In the current political climate, though, this remains a utopian ideal, as the recent federal election funding reforms have amply demonstrated. The new laws, blatantly designed to strengthen the two-party system and waved through parliament with the combined votes of the Labor and the Coalition, restrict the ability of individual candidates to fund their local campaigns while allowing the big political parties to conduct multi-million dollar national campaigns.